Friday, September 12, 2014

“I Thought High-Profile People Get Away With Stuff Like This.”

in
honor of both greg hardy choking his girlfriend on top of a couch full of
assault weapons and ray rice showing his fiancé his left fist because she's not
ready for his right, i've decided to post this article i wrote a few years back
but never finalized. it’s about the culture of violence in sports. but more
than that, it's about the culture that lets the people who commit violent acts
get away with it.

Ray Rice beating the mother of his children.

In the Middle Ages, during
peacetime, when knights had no one to fight, no dragons to slay, nothing to
do—they would get into trouble. The kind of trouble that involved young ladies
and drink and violence. Who could stop them?—they were the biggest, the
strongest, and filled with a testosterone-soaked sense of self-entitlement.
They had their way with whoever, whenever. Consequences be damned.

To control the knights,
the people of the Middle Ages invented something called Courtly Love. And the point of courtly love was, as
C.S. Lewis wrote: “Love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may
be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy” ... “and the Religion of Love.” In
practice, what it was, was a way to get those huge, violent doofuses to stop
raping women, killing other young men, and destroying everything.

Now, in a different time,
but with a similar problem, it’s doubtful that the concept of courtly love
would stop professional athletes from committing violence against women. But,
there’s no doubt, considering recent headlines...something has to be done.

"Take Saints defensive end Will Smith. On
November 27, 2010, police in Lafayette, Louisiana, observed Smith dragging his
wife by the hair down the street from a club. Smith was arrested him and
charged him with domestic violence. Those charges were dropped once Smith
completed a “diversion program,” which means he avoided prosecution by agreeing
to community service and counseling—a common result that you’ll find a lot in
this essay."

In 1998, Buffalo Bill linebacker Cornelius
Bennett pleaded guilty to sexual assault involving “vicious acts” according
to Erie County judge John V. Rogowski. So vicious, the judge had no choice but
to sentence him to 60 whole days in
jail, a sentence the judge said he “fully deserved.” Bennett ended up serving
36 days.

Years ago, I defended
sports and the sports culture from a woman in a graduate school class who said
that sports bred violence and aggression in men. I said that there were
hundreds and hundreds of athletes who were good husbands and honorable
men. And to that I hold. There are many decent family men, athletes we can
take pride in.

Yet…we can’t stick our
heads in the sand. After hundreds of reports of violence committed against
women by professional athletes—incidents so commonplace that as fans, we aren’t
even shocked anymore—one has to wonder: Do sports, in fact, lead to violent
aggression?

My answer is no. But
with a caveat. It’s not the sports, but the culture surrounding them. It’s not
the violence they commit inside the lines. It’s the violence they commit off
the field…without any consequences.

In an essay entitled “Out of Bounds: The Truth About Athletes and Rape” by writer Jill Neimark, she discusses the
culture of rape on college campuses and in the professional sports world. “Remember
that athletics is not the problem—but cultures that glorify athletes more than anything
else.”

The Love

And that culture leads
to cases like these. “The ‘hotshot syndrome’ is inevitably part of team
sports,” says Dr. Gondolf, in the book Sport in Contemporary Society: An Anthology. “If you’re an athlete in college, you’re
given a scholarship, a nice dorm room, doctors, trainers, a lot of support and
attention, and fans and cheerleaders who ogle you—that sense of privilege
influences you, and some guys may then think: ‘I deserve something for this. I
can take women, the rules don’t apply to me.’ They feel they’re above the law.”

“I used to have girls
call me up,” says one unidentified former college quarterback, “and say, ‘I go
to football games and watch you, I look at your picture in the program, I’m
writing a paper on you.’ It happened all the time. You get this attitude where
you can do anything you want and nobody is ever going to say anything to you.”

Neil DeMause’s article in
the Village Voice “Punch like a
Man,” quotes experts in athletes and violence who say it’s the sense of
entitlement that results that is the key: Athletes are told from high school on
up that their athletic prowess puts them above the law—by the cops who let them
off for speeding tickets, by the club owners who hush up their abusive behavior
in order to ensure a steady flow of celebrities through their doors, by the college
administrators and pro team officials who cut deals to keep their star players
on the field. “If you give somebody so much extra privilege in certain areas,
and so much adulation, it warps their sense of what their boundaries are. I
don’t want to say it does it to everybody, but that’s a very common dynamic,”
says Stephen Grams, whose Tucson-based SAGE is one of the first licensed
batterer-counseling groups in the country.

The list of guns on Greg Hardy's futon as he choked
Nicole Holder. All those guns...and a futon? Hardy, really?

Let’s play devil’s
advocate for a moment. Athletes—major ones, at least—are celebrities. Aren’t
they therefore targets for women who cry rape even though none occurred, just
to extort money from these athletes?

It’s certainly possible.
But it doesn’t explain accusations from women at smaller colleges where the
athletes have virtually no chance to make it big and become rich. In addition,
an FBI investigation into rape accusations put the number of false rape reports
at roughly eight percent. Even if that number is grossly underestimated, we
would still have to conclude that there are a lot of accusations that are true
(and that’s not accounting for the attacks that aren’t reported).

So if there are athletes
committing some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, across the board—from
Florida State to Idaho State—how is it possible that they get off with just a
wrist slap? In “Out
of Bounds: The Truth About Athletes and Rape,” Niemark quotes Dr. Claire Walsh: “We
don’t want to believe our athletes are capable of this. So we immediately
rename it, call it group sex, and perform a character assassination on the
victim. It’s her fault— no matter what the circumstances…When we’re talking about athletic
teams and gang rape, we see how, time after time, the entire community comes to
the support of the team. Athletes are very important in the fabric of a campus
or town. They keep alumni interested, and produce money for the community.”

The Money

Frostee Rucker, at 13,
was arrested for raping a childhood friend. Ultimately, Rucker was acquitted in
juvenile court after many members of the community came forward in his defense citing
his being an outstanding student athlete with potential and a very upstanding individual.
Rape notwithstanding.

At Colorado State,
Rucker was accused and charged with sexual assault of a fellow CSU athlete who
claimed that he had forced himself on her. However, the accuser eventually
refused to testify, as did another female student at Colorado State who claimed
to have been assaulted by Rucker. He was charged with simple assault. He then
transferred to USC.

It continues. At USC,
Rucker is charged with assault and domestic violence. According to ex-girlfriend
Joelle Branshe, Rucker would habitually rough her up, smack her down, and beat
her up. Rucker settled the matter out of court and didn’t receive any
punishment at all.

So where does all the
negligent justice lead to? Well it leads to here. Some wife-beating that results in a sentence of three
years probation, a “harsh” $520-dollar fine, and the obligatory 750 hours of
community service. And a one-game suspension from the NFL.

And it continues. Jameis
Winston, Heisman Award Winner and certain first-round pick in the 2015 NFL
Draft, was involved in a sexual assault scandal that occurred in
2012. The accuser was found to have several bruises, and tests would
later find semen on her underwear. But an examination by The New York Times has found that there was virtually no
investigation at all, “either by the police or the university.” The police
didn’t interview Winston for two weeks, never obtained his DNA and—showing
either massive negligence and incompetence, or deliberate malfeasance—by the
time the investigation asked for a recording of the sexual encounter, it had been
erased. “They just missed all the basic fundamental stuff that you are supposed
to do,” said the prosecutor Mr. Meggs. The Times continues:

“The case has unfolded as colleges and
universities across the country are facing rising criticism over how they deal
with sexual assault, as well as questions about whether athletes sometimes
receive preferential treatment. The Times’ examination—based on police and
university records, as well as interviews with people close to the case,
including lawyers and sexual assault experts—found that, in the Winston case,
Florida State did little to determine what had happened. University
administrators, in apparent violation of federal law, did not promptly
investigate either the rape accusation or the witness’s admission that he had
videotaped part of the encounter.”

“Why did the school not even attempt to investigate the
matter until after the football season?” said John Clune, another lawyer for
the accuser.

Simply put, when an athlete commits a crime a
crime against a woman, it gets pushed aside due to the money they raise for the
school (or professional ball club). Indeed, in 2013, Mr.
Winston’s accuser and another Florida State student sued the Tallahassee police
department alleging that during the Winston investigation the PD investigated
them instead of the star Florida State quarterback.

Marci, a student at Florida State in 1999, was raped. Like Winston's
accuser, she received no help from the Tallahassee police. Her
sorority has received bomb threats since unconfirmed
rumors pinpoint's accuser as a member of the sorority.

The Times does a quick review of the money made at Florida
State. “…the Seminole Boosters, a nonprofit organization…with nearly $150
million in assets, that is the primary financier of Florida State athletics,
according to records and a lawyer for the boosters. It also paid roughly a
quarter of the $602,000 salary of the university president, Eric Barron…” Boosters
gave all that money to the school, including the university president. Why
would Florida State University hinder that moneymaking process?

The 2013 Florida State national football championship season
generated millions of dollars for the athletic department and city businesses.
So Florida State tried to bury the incident. And if you think this was the
first time a possible crime was ignored . . . “A decade before the Winston
case, the inspector general found that Florida State had violated its policy
when the athletic department failed to inform the campus police of a rape
accusation against one of its standout football players. Mr. Ruiz, the former
prosecutor who handled the case for the state attorney’s office, recalled that
the coach at the time, the revered Bobby Bowden, attempted to convince him that
a crime had not occurred. A jury eventually acquitted the player.” Money takes
precedence.

Average Angels

Recently, on NPR, longtime
sports commentator Frank Deford took a leave of his senses and argued that we
should essentially ignore the fact that athletes commit crimes. Here’s Deford:

“What always confounds me is the premise
that Commissioner Roger Goodell cited—as do the other so-called czars of sport—that
their players ‘have to be held to a higher standard.’ But why? Why, pray, of
all people, are athletes, pretty much alone in our society, expected to be
sweeter than the average angel?”

Well, they need not be
angels. But they shouldn’t be treated as it they were above the law. Getting
wrist slaps for battery and rape shouldn’t be tolerated because they can hit
home runs or sack quarterbacks. They should be held accountable for their
actions. Just like any average angel.

Is it too much to expect
for them to behave like normal people? And expect justice when they don’t? Is
it really unrealistic for the public to expect players to not choke and slap
their wives, and point a loaded handgun at her head in front of their children
(1). Or to expect a player to not threaten to kill his wife, then go out and
impregnate a 17-year-old foster child, and then throw a Gatorade bottle at said
foster child when she tells the athlete about the pregnancy (2). Or knowingly
commit statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl, whom you knew for 4 years, after
getting her drunk (3). Or sexually assault a girl in a dorm room, grope another
girl in a crowded bar and tell her how she loved it in an obscenity-laced
tirade, then “allegedly” rape another girl twice in two days, the second time
in front of his teammates (4).

Bobby Chouinard (1)
played two more seasons after the incident above. He actually was arrested and served time for
holding a gun to his wife’s head while she begged for her life on Christmas Day
1998. But he got to serve his year in jail in three-month increments so he
could still play baseball. Elijah Dukes (2) was arrested four times for battery
and once for assault before the above
incident happened in 2007. He played two more seasons in the MLB, making just
short of a million dollars. (3) DeShawn Stevenson, for the statutory rape in
2001, served as (of all things) a
celebrity youth counselor at basketball camps for 103 hours. He played in
the NBA until 2013 and has made almost 30 million dollars, not including his
endorsements. (4) Christian Peter, for the three incidents above, was suspended
for, wait for it, an exhibition
game, then served 18 months of a suspended sentence. Afterwards, Peter played six
years in the NFL. In 2006, Peter was named to the University of Nebraska Hall
of Fame.

“We’re not the criminal justice system. We
can’t cure every ill in society. You know, we’re putting on football games. And
unless it impacts on the business, we have to be very careful [from a legal
standpoint] about disciplinary action we take.”

Juliette Terzieff wrote
in womensenews.org, “Grooming, training and marketing sports stars is a
multi-million dollar industry that takes root early on as universities invest
alumni donations heavily into their athletic programs.” So universities realize
that they need athletes to play to get their alumni to donate large
sums of money. And thus players know they will get protection when they get
into trouble. Because doing something would impact business.

Above the Law

We know why Universities
and professional sports tolerate athletes who commit assault and rape. Why
would society? One theory: Athletes get accolades from society as
a result of
their violence on
the field— and so to a certain extent we as a society have come to expect them
to act the same way off it. “Why should we expect them to be like us? They’re
inhuman barbarians. Playing a barbaric game destroying each other like
gladiators. They’re not like us.” And therefore we forgive them for it.

“It’s a tempting
correlation, but far too easy,” says National Coalition Against Violent
Athlete’s Kathy Redmond (the woman “allegedly” raped by Christian Peter twice
in two days), whose organization advises and counsels victims of violence from
athletes at the pro and college levels. Redmond notes that the sport she’s been
hearing the most reports on lately is men’s pro volleyball. “That tells me that
it’s not necessarily the violence [of the sport]; it’s the fact that you have
pro tours where the money’s coming in,” she says.

Philp Merling, 6'5" and 310 lbs., punched his girlfriend,
who was pregnant at the time. Charges were dropped
when the woman left Merling and returned
home in another state.

Yet there must be
something to the fact that society seems to accept all these domestic abuse
charges. The leagues and universities have their reasons to ignore the crimes,
but society at large and fans in particular—why don’t they do anything about
it?

The title of this
article comes from the court testimony of Nicole Holder, former girlfriend of
Carolina Panther Greg Hardy, whom Hardy was convicted of assaulting and
threatening to kill.
When asked why she didn’t initially give a statement to police, this is what
she said in full.

"I
thought high-profile people get away with stuff like this. He’s Greg Hardy
of the Carolina Panthers.” (Emphasis mine)

Holder’s statement
reflects the truth. In America, we have undeniably, and dangerously, created a
class of society for athletes, where the laws that apply to everyone else don’t
apply to them. We have learned well from past events that when an athlete
commits a crime, don’t expect justice to be equal.

We praise athletes,
coddle them . . . and as a result, create a system to protect them from
consequences. A system where truly, a segment of society is above the law. And
where a culture of violence is allowed to flourish and where women come second
to the “impact on business.” And that’s the reason why Christian Peter didn’t
get punished. Or Elijah Dukes. Or Abram Elam. Or Lawrence Clay-Bey. Or Stan
Callender. Or Isiah Rider. Or Jameis Winston. Or Oklahoma State linebacker
Chris Collins who received probation for the aggravated sexual assault of a
12-year-old girl. Or…

So very true and we, as a country, fan, police officer, college coaches, recruiters, teammates, NFL coaches, girlfriends of athletes, wives of athletes, etc...., have to do better!!!! This is so disturbing to read but yet so very true!!! No one should be untouchable from the crimes they committed or from the judicial system! No One!!

BE A PLAYER!

About Me

Born and raised in Brooklyn, I'm a sports junkie with an overabundance of opinions and a unused degree in writing. I decided to let vent with this blog and hope somebody out there would like to read what I write. Hope you enjoy, and if you do or don't let me know what you think.